5 New Year's Resolutions For The Game Industry

It's the start of a new year. Out with the old, in with the new, and time to start cracking on those resolutions. The video games industry should be no different: It's pretty great, but it could always be better and, more importantly, it should always be striving for improvement. To that end, here are five games resolutions we'd like to see tackled in 2015.

More transparency

As much guff as I used to give overpriced DLC, at least you knew what you were getting when you forked over $6 for a single outfit in Street Fighter IV. Nowadays, any sort of transparency when it comes to purchasing post-launch content has gone right out the window. It went from being vague—Pay $30 up front for five map packs throughout the next year—to downright cryptic, offering up the promise of future content without actually stating what gamers will be paying for. Now you can buy a $100 version of Halo 5 without knowing what you're getting beyond “digital content” at some point down the road, and that's for a game that hasn't even released yet. If your post-launch plans aren't nailed down and available, you shouldn't be able to charge for a promise. We expect Joe Average to provide a detailed plan on Kickstarter before chipping in $5 for his crazy invention, yet we're expected to fork over dozens of dollars on digital content without the slightest idea as to what we're actually getting? Developers/publishers need to have more respect for their customers and the customers need to have more respect for themselves by not purchasing the unknown.